Best evidence criteria: Nahm excerpt #2

Michael Nahm, in his Bigelow award-winning essay, "Climbing Mount Evidence: A Strategic Assessment of the Best Available Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death," writes: "In order to determine the best available evidence for human survival from a contemporary perspective, I have considered 10 survival phenomena. These are listed below, roughly following the occurrence of significant cases over the course of history.

1.    After-death contacts including near-death visions

     2.    Hauntings

3.    Poltergeist phenomena

4.    Physical mediumship

5.    Mental mediumship

6.    Near-death experiences

7.    Hypnotic past-life regression

8.    Cases of the reincarnation type

9.    Instrumental transcommunication

10. Terminal lucidity

"I used five criteria to determine the evidential strength of these survival phenomena.

1.  Investigability: Possibilities for investigating a single case; duration of the phenomena; accessibility for researchers; potential numbers of independent eyewitnesses.

2.  Repeatability: Multiple occurrences of similar cases at different times and locations; possibilities for involving different researchers.

3.  Quantitative strength: Complexity or richness in details of the provided survival evidence in single cases and case collections.

4.  Qualitative strength: Clarity of observational conditions and reliability of eyewitness testimonies; degree of objectivity vs. subjectivity; (un-)ambiguity of the phenomena with regard to being interpreted in terms of survival but not by alternative models.

5.  Relevance: Degree of the phenomena’s relatedness in meaning to human survival after permanent bodily death.

"For all survival phenomena, I assigned each criterion a score of appropriateness on a simple scale running from 'low' (1), 'relatively low' (2), relatively high' (3), to high' (4). The best evidence for survival from today’s perspective was determined by comparing the sums of these scores for every survival phenomenon, their 'survival scores'.

The survival phenomena that attained the highest scores were cases of the reincarnation type, mental mediumship, after-death contacts including near-death visions, and near-death experiences. This is hardly surprising because these are precisely the survival phenomena that have been most frequently discussed in the more recent literature on survival. Hence, I will only consider these four survival phenomena in more detail below. In the following sections, I describe how the survival scores of the most promising survival phenomena were determined.

 

Michael Nahm is a German biologist and parapsychologist whose psi research has focused on terminal lucidity, near-death experiences, cases of the reincarnation type, physical mediumship, hauntings, the history of parapsychology, and various other riddles of the mind and the evolution of life. In 2018 he accepted an appointment at the Institut für Grenzgebiete der Psychologie und Psychohygiene (IGPP) (Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health) in Freiburg, Germany. His publications are available at http://www.michaelnahm.com/publications-and-downloads and his Bigelow essay may be downloaded at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes have been deleted in these excerpts but are available in his text posted on the Bigelow website.

Studying survival phenomena: Nahm excerpt #1

Michael Nahm, in his Bigelow award-winning essay, "Climbing Mount Evidence: A Strategic Assessment of the Best Available Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death," writes: "The question of whether human consciousness can survive permanent bodily death is one of the most tantalizing enigmas of our existence. Unfortunately, most scientists shy away from addressing this enigma. Many seem to think that there is not much to investigate because it has already been shown that consciousness is produced by brain chemistry and will dissolve as soon as neuronal activity ceases. However, I am convinced that this notion is inappropriate for two reasons.

"First, from a theoretical perspective, nothing in physics and chemistry predicts that protons, electrons, atoms, or molecules will produce something like consciousness. Therefore, trying to explain consciousness in physicochemical terms amounts to backward reasoning from the start. In fact, William James, the founder of American psychology, argued more than 100 years ago that it is principally impossible to prove that brain chemistry produces consciousness—all we can observe are 'concomitant variations' of brain states and states of consciousness. Accordingly, many modern neuroscientists speak of 'neuronal correlates' to states of consciousness in order to avoid fostering the unwarranted notion that consciousness is produced by neuronal activity. Indeed, there is not even a strict parallelism between brain states and states of consciousness.

"Second, from a practical perspective, many scientists have already investigated phenomena at the frontiers of knowledge that question the physicochemical “production hypothesis” of consciousness. These phenomena have chiefly been studied in research disciplines known as psychical research or parapsychology. The phenomena themselves are usually referred to as telepathy (conveying knowledge or feelings from one individual to another without using the usual sensory channels), clairvoyance (perceiving information or events without using the usual sensory channels), precognition and retrocognition (perceiving future or past events), and psychokinesis (psychically affecting matter). These psi phenomena occur comparably rarely, but they do occur and they are perfectly natural. Millions of people have experienced them in everyday life.

"Likewise, phenomena suggestive of survival have been reported since time immemorial. Hence, these experiences can be studied using standard methods of science. More than that: Given that survival is one of the most fundamental questions facing mankind, it is the duty of scientists to study survival-related phenomena, and to do so with an impartial spirit. Among those who have often insisted that studying such psi phenomena including survival should constitute the most important function of science was the renowned biologist, philosopher and parapsychologist Hans Driesch (1867–1941). He furthermore advocated for:

the joy in tracing specifically those prospects the facticity of which has hardly yet been explored, perhaps only foreboded. Only new discoveries take us further, and the ‘newer’ they are, the more do they take us further. Hence my interest in parapsychology.

"In many of his writings, Driesch emphasized that, in natural science, empirical data and arguments are of foremost significance. He stressed that when we discover evidence for phenomena that don’t fit into the currently prevailing world model, we must stay open to revising this model rather than disregarding inconvenient data. Driesch proposed three guiding principles for the study of psi phenomena that are as topical today as they were almost 100 years ago: 

• Do not regard any fact “impossible” in an aprioristic way.
• Do not believe that new facts must necessarily be explained by means of explanations already established.
• Try to construct bridges to established scientific disciplines.

"However, it seems that only a few scientists shared such a rationale. One of them was psychiatrist Ian Stevenson at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, who considered the study of spontaneous psychical phenomena occurring in everyday life exceptionally important. He counted survival phenomena among these. In a Presidential Address at a convention of the Parapsychological Association in 1968, Stevenson presented three arguments for his desire to develop improved methods for the study of spontaneous cases in parapsychology in addition to performing quantitative laboratory experiments: 

• Spontaneous cases provide some of the best evidence we have for psi phenomena.
• They often provide much richer information than the outcomes of laboratory experiments.
• They pertain to everyday life and have a profound influence on the beliefs and actions of the people who come into contact with them.

"Stevenson was convinced that the withdrawal of many parapsychologists from the study of spontaneous cases had resulted in a loss of public support and interest in parapsychology. Although he admitted that studying such cases could have methodological weaknesses, he insisted that the appropriate answer would involve improving investigation methods rather than abandoning their study.

"I fully agree with Stevenson’s appraisal, while adding that the possibilities for studying and documenting spontaneous cases, including survival phenomena, have improved considerably since 1968. Of course, they will continue to improve. Therefore, the aims of the present BICS contest to identify the best available evidence for human survival, to raise awareness among the public and within the scientific community, and to encourage future research, are of supreme topicality.

"In my contribution, I argue that there is substantial evidence that establishes the survival of human consciousness. By 'survival of human consciousness' or 'human survival, I mean a broad notion covering 'any aspect of a personality that displays a seemingly self-aware identification and verifiable knowledge continuity with a deceased personality'.

"My essay is structured as follows: In the succeeding Chapter 2, I identify the best available evidence for survival among the different kinds of survival phenomena. I demonstrate that this best evidence is constituted by cases of the reincarnation type (CORT). While doing so, I largely treat the discussed survival phenomena as reported and touch only lightly on their reliability and authenticity, or on how they might best be explained. In order to be truly convincing, the power of explanatory models for a range of given phenomena must be tested by applying them to the most compelling data or evidence. Hence, the best survival evidence among all considered phenomena should first be identified, and only then must the nature of this best evidence be questioned in more depth. Therefore, I only perform an in-depth discussion of different explanatory models for survival phenomena with regard to CORT.

"But before that, Chapter 3 introduces several facets of CORT in more detail. Providing a more comprehensive picture of the phenomenology of CORT is important for determining the most appropriate explanatory model for them. This determination is crucial because it is not enough to merely identify the best available evidence for survival—one must also check whether this evidence is good evidence. As philosopher Michael Sudduth pointed out, the best available evidence for something can still be weak overall and lack persuasive power.

"The in-depth analysis of the strength of the evidence for survival provided by CORT is performed in Chapter 4, relating it to two alternative explanatory models:

1. The physicalist model. This model is based on the assumption that consciousness can be explained by physics and its derivate, chemistry; it is the above-mentioned physicochemical 'production hypothesis' of consciousness. Here, psi phenomena such as telepathy and clairvoyance cannot occur. Likewise, the extra-corporeal existence of consciousness and memory, including survival, cannot occur. All witness testimonies in CORT that favor survival are therefore regarded as flawed in one way or another.

2. The living-agent psi model. This model is based on the assumptions that eyewitness testimonies about survival phenomena are largely authentic and that psi phenomena such as telepathy and clairvoyance can occur. However, it is argued that survival phenomena are not generated by the deceased, but by those still alive. Driven by specific individual motives, living people activate hidden psi faculties and psychically obtain the information required to simulate survival phenomena including CORT. Thereby, usually without even consciously knowing it, they fulfill their own hopes and needs—for example, by creating an apparition or, in CORT, a 'reincarnated' loved one. This model might sound unreasonable for those not familiar with parapsychology, but many parapsychologists acquainted with the huge variety of psi phenomena take it very seriously and it is prominently discussed in the literature concerning the survival question.

In Chapter 5, I put the outcome of the discussions about CORT back into the larger perspective of other survival phenomena and human life, and frame it in the context of 'proof beyond a reasonable doubt' as requested in this contest.

In Chapter 6, I provide an outlook concerning future perspectives. 

 

Michael Nahm is a German biologist and parapsychologist whose psi research has focused on terminal lucidity, near-death experiences, cases of the reincarnation type, physical mediumship, hauntings, the history of parapsychology, and various other riddles of the mind and the evolution of life. In 2018 he accepted an appointment at the Institut für Grenzgebiete der Psychologie und Psychohygiene (IGPP) (Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health) in Freiburg, Germany. His publications are available at http://www.michaelnahm.com/publications-and-downloads and his Bigelow essay may be downloaded at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes have been deleted in these excerpts but are available in his text posted on the Bigelow website.

Consciousness after death: Ruickbie excerpt #31

Psychologist Leo Ruickbie writes in “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies: Take a shaft of light and pass it through a prism and it reveals that rich rainbow of colors that make up what we see. That is my approach here. I have taken the beam of paranormal experience and passed it through a prism to reveal its different frequencies, but where some researchers specialize, perhaps only studying the red or the blue, I have wanted to study this whole spectrum, because it is the whole spectrum that tells us what light is.

As defined at the beginning, ‘ghost’ means an immaterial identity format (IIF), the conscious ‘I’, and we looked for it specifically in the three categories of experiential time. What we have found is evidence for ghosts of the past in Martindale’s Roman soldiers, and others, and also in the life review that is often a part of the NDE, as well as in the huge amount of evidence for reincarnation. We found ghosts of the present in the form of crisis apparitions and after-death communications, as well as evidence for the ability for consciousness to leave the body as a result of accident, illness or intention in various conditions termed OBEs, NDEs (and actual-death experiences), travelling clairvoyance, etc. Ghosts of the future were apparent in premonitions, memorably when Irene Kuhn saw her own ‘ghost’ in the future, but we also saw disembodied consciousness show itself to be conscious at a point beyond physical death in the past, and how consciousness beyond the body could witness the life preview of what was yet to come.

The argument put forward does not rely on one piece of evidence, or one case, so if one case is found in error it does not derail the overall argument. In fact, for each area of evidence considered, many other cases could be brought forward if needed. As said at the beginning, the amount of evidence is not the problem – the problem is why we do not believe it.

The witness was always the weakest link in the chain of evidence. As far as possible we sought to establish the credibility and reliability of the witness, and to consider possible motives. When a witness is credible, reliable and motiveless, then we must take them at their word. They could still be mistaken, ill, drugged, or another explanation, such as telepathy might be produced. This is where multiple witnesses to the same event are of paramount value. Where otherwise credible, reliable and motiveless witnesses agree, it would be unreasonable to insist on their being wrong.

Even if right in having witnessed something, the explanation of what that something is could still be different. Shared hallucination or group telepathy have been forwarded, but such explanations become more difficult to uphold when information is acquired from the experience that the witnesses would not otherwise have had.

This higher level of evidentiality was also matched by using statistics to achieve a greater degree of representativeness. Even the best witness could still be an exception proving nothing. This is why we also used statistical analyses of sometimes thousands of cases to resolve the quirks, leaving a higher level of probability – a level of evidence beyond reasonable doubt.

It has already been noted that the evidence for life after death would be sufficient to prove the case in a court of law. One of the earliest to do so was author John Vyvyan (1908–1975). Writing in 1966, he said “a jury might well be convinced of a life after death on the basis of these arguments.” Since then, researchers have amassed almost sixty years’ worth of additional evidence in every area concerned with life after death. If it were enough to convince a jury then, how much more so now?

Have I convinced myself? Having now laid out the ‘best’ evidence and connected the dots, as it were, the Scrooge in me may still be thinking of my stomach, but the scientist must acknowledge the evidence even when it contradicts cherished theories. This evidence leads necessarily to the conclusion that our ‘ghost,’ consciousness, can exist independently of space and time, the fundamental co-ordinates of the body. Such a bold claim has been made before, but this time we have also seen that modern physics has revealed a universe in which just such a state could exist where consciousness itself is a quantum process and time is an emergent property of quantum entanglement, timetanglement.

The British philosopher Gilbert Ryle coined the term “ghost in the machine” to sum up the mind–body dualism espoused by René Descartes, and others since, that the mind and body are separate. Ryle thought that Descartes had made a category mistake, but whether philosophically in error or not, we have seen that there are copious examples of the mind acting independently of the body, even existing independently of the body in cases of actual death. And that in those states, consciousness is described as operating not only outside of the body (space), but outside of time as well. We realize that it is the physical body that creates time for the mind, that the ghost is not just in a machine, but in a time machine. 

 

Leo Ruickbie, “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies. Ruickbie teaches psychology at Kings College and the University of Northamptom in the United Kingdom. Footnotes have been deleted from these online excerpts from his essay. The entire essay may be downloaded at the Bigelow site https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

Information survival: Ruickbie excerpt #30

Psychologist Leo Ruickbie writes in “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies:   

     Stuart Hamaroff MD and Sir Roger Penrose      

If brain is the receiver of consciousness, then it needs some means of receiving. Descartes proposed the pineal gland, and whilst this idea still crops up, modern medical research has thoroughly scotched it. Instead, quantum physics provides some possibility of a mechanism to bridge mind and matter. There is evidence for quantum effects in a range of biological processes, naturally researchers have wondered whether brain function could find answers there, too. Several theories of mind as a quantum process have already emerged. The most well-known is Oxford physicist Sir Roger Penrose and Prof. Stuart Hameroff's explanation using quantum gravity and vibrations in fractal protein structures (microtubules) in neurons to argue that the microtubules function as quantum computing devices. This is especially convincing in light of recent experimental findings in its favor.

In quantum computing, bits of information (qubits) exist simultaneously in an ‘on’ and ‘off’ state called superposition (this is what Schrödinger’s Cat is all about: being dead and alive until observed (measured)) before being unified into a single ‘calculation’ or ‘decision.’ Penrose and Hameroff argue that this takes place in the neuronal microtubules as an ‘orchestrated’ spacetime modification or ‘objective reduction’ of superposition. Hence the theory is known as Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch-OR). Hameroff described it as being like an orchestra, by which he meant that coherent meaning (the sound of the music) is created by vibrating structures (the playing of the instruments), with the musicians’ decision to play/not play being the objective reduction.

The quantum state represents an information process: both one thing and the other, in the way light can be both a particle and a wave, until measurement causes a collapse of the wave function and it becomes one or the other. By modulating electromagnetic waves (light, infrared, radio, etc.) we can encode information; Mother Nature seems to do this with quantum states. This is the ‘bridge’ between cloud consciousness and the physical body.

Penrose and Hameroff both saw the metaphysical implications of this. Hameroff made it clear that: “The connection to space–time geometry also raises the intriguing possibility that Orch-OR allows consciousness apart from the brain and body, distributed and entangled in space–time geometry,” and that “quantum information can exist outside the body, perhaps indefinitely, as a soul.” Mathematical physicist Henry Stapp has also been working on quantum theories of consciousness and similarly concluded that “aspects of a personality might be able to survive bodily death.”

Support comes from another area. Grappling with the problem of how to define information in physics, Oxford physicist Prof. David Deutsch, a pioneer in quantum computing, proposed Constructor Theory. This describes a deeper level of physics more fundamental than particles and waves, and spacetime. Deutsch had been working on the premise that “the quantum theory of computation is the whole of physics,” i.e., it is the underlying level, but realized that, although quantum computation can simulate any other object, including its characteristic programs, it cannot relate which program connects with which object, which requires another level of explanation. Constructor Theory answers this by being more fundamental as it concerns the laws governing what is possible and what is not – it is a law about physical laws.

Information seems abstract but only a physical object can compute information and that for the theory of information to work within physics, then it must have a physical quantity; yet physical information is independent of the physical object that contains it. As an example, take the writing of this essay: the words are formed in my mind, transferred through nerves to my fingers where they are expressed as kinetic energy hitting the keyboard and stored as digital information on my hard drive, this is then transferred across the internet to be reconfigured as the text you are now reading, a light signal received by your eyes and interpreted by your brain to produce the sensation of hearing these words in your mind.

The information has crossed biological and man-made systems, it has been electrical, electromagnetic and kinetic energy at different times. At every point in the process the information has been something and resided in something, but the two were not dependent – the only constant in this process was the information, so we must think of the information as more fundamental. If information is independent of the system, and that information is consciousness (as quantum states of qubits) and the system the body, then the death of the body does not mean the end of consciousness. 

Leo Ruickbie, “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies. Ruickbie teaches psychology at Kings College and the University of Northamptom in the United Kingdom. Footnotes have been deleted from these online excerpts from his essay. The entire essay may be downloaded at the Bigelow site https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

 

Timetanglement: Ruickbie excerpt #29

Psychologist Leo Ruickbie writes in “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies:   

In 1983, Don Page and William Wootters showed how the quantum phenomenon of entanglement – where two particles can remain in apparent contact even though separated (non-locality), Einstein’s famous “spooky action at a distance” – can be used to measure time. They argued that the way in which entangled particles evolve can be seen as a kind of clock, allowing the measurement of change. An observer within the system could compare this evolution against the rest of the system – the system being the physical universe. In doing so, the observer would be able to measure the passage of time as a relative difference of change between two things. 

However, an observer outside the system using an external clock to measure change would see no change in the entangled particles, meaning that time does not exist. This leads to the conclusion that time is an emergent property of quantum entanglement. 

Ingenious though it was, because it was impossible to have an observer outside the universe, the theory could never be tested. That is, until a team of researchers led by Ekaterina Moreva at the Instituto Nazionale di Ricerca Metrologica (INRIM) in Turin, Italy, built their own universe to test it out.

Using two entangled photons in a deceptively simple setup, the experimenters were able to position internal and external “observers” to their mini-universe. In the first condition, the internal observer becomes entangled with the system by measuring it. In the second condition, the external observer remains outside the system and uses an independent measure of time. They discovered that within the universe they could measure change, whilst outside the universe there was no change. Page and Wootters had been right: time is an emergent property of entanglement.

To make this clearer let us try a metaphor. A river appears to be there in all its entirety to an external observer at a sufficient altitude. He can see its source, its in-between points and its mouth; but push him into the river and his observation changes dramatically, suddenly there is flow (passage of time) and the experience of the river is reduced to the point (the present) at which the observer is bobbing about in it. It is only a metaphor, but it gives us a more tangible idea of time as an emergent property of entanglement within a system, “timetanglement.” 

Leo Ruickbie, “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies. Ruickbie teaches psychology at Kings College and the University of Northamptom in the United Kingdom. Footnotes have been deleted from these online excerpts from his essay. The entire essay may be downloaded at the Bigelow site https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

Special theory of immateriality: Ruickbie #28

Psychologist Leo Ruickbie writes in “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies:  The observations presented here allow two hypotheses: 1) that consciousness can exist independently of the physical body; and 2) that consciousness can seemingly operate in a state outside our everyday experience of space and time. The first does not violate any ‘laws’ because we have no laws of consciousness, although it does contradict our expectation that consciousness is dependent on the brain but is explicable if we use the alternative “reducing valve” model.

Herman Minkowski             

The second does not contradict any laws because physics has shown that our everyday experience of space and time is not an accurate one. Physics now operates on at least a four-dimensional understanding of spacetime (Einstein–Minkowski). As cosmologist Prof. Bernard Carr has pointed out, there is plenty of “space for psi” in current physics; however, here we are looking for a model of spacetime that could accommodate the view of consciousness and reality revealed in this paper. Under certain conditions, consciousness demonstrates the ability to transcend space and time as we ordinarily experience it, so as well as another location for consciousness, we also need another time, or another understanding of it.

Near the end of his life, Einstein famously wrote that “The distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” The problem persists: the British physicist Paul Davies also confessed that “To be perfectly honest, neither scientists nor philosophers really know what time is or why it exists.”

Cambridge Professor of Astronomy, Sir Arthur Eddington coined the phrase “time’s arrow” in 1927, meaning simply that physical things have a necessary and unavoidable direction of change from one state to another that cannot be reversed. This is essentially our experience of time. However, the fundamental equations of classical physics (such as Newton’s laws of motion) do not distinguish between past and future, they are time-reversible, and what we call the present “has no proper place in the temporal of physics at all,” according to the Slovakian astrophysicist Metod Saniga. What physics does is quantify points on the time dimension – it takes no account of subjective, experiential time, the time that moves constantly forwards, the so-called arrow of time.

As Prof. Utts has pointed out, after studying the research data for her official report on Project Star Gate, “Physicists are currently grappling with the concept of time and cannot rule out precognition as being consistent with current understanding,” and that “distance in time and space do not seem to be an impediment” – exactly the conclusion I came to in my analysis of Scott’s WWI traveling clairvoyance experiments.* But the question of time does not only relate to precognition because, as we have seen, precognition can apply to a range of sensory experiences that are experienced directly by consciousness, not the senses, meaning that what we are talking about here is not some ability of consciousness, but consciousness itself.

We have seen examples where an observer in his present sees an apparition in its past, and even where an apparition sees the observer in its future, then this must logically lead to the premise that time exists in its entirety all of the time, that is, time is not just the movement of physical objects through space (change), but a thing in itself. This itself seems counter-intuitive, but modern physics can support such a possibility.

Albert Einstein’s mathematics teacher, Professor Hermann Minkowski, argued that the past, present and future co-exist ‘at once’ in four-dimensional spacetime, where time is itself a dimension in addition to the familiar three spatial dimensions. This was the basis for Einstein’s theories of relativity. In contrast to our generally accepted idea of time being absolute for everyone, within these four dimensions, observers moving relative to one another will have a different experience of what is happening now, that is, their experience of time will be different. Thus, an observer moving faster than another could experience as ‘present’ what is for the other ‘future.’

This four-dimensional “block universe” in which time exists all at once would allow an external observer (e.g., in the higher dimensional bulk) to see past, present and future, just like someone experiencing an NDE life review or life preview, or someone having a premonition. But how could this be possible? 

* See Ruickbie excerpt #14.

 

Leo Ruickbie, “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies. Ruickbie teaches psychology at Kings College and the University of Northamptom in the United Kingdom. Footnotes have been deleted from these online excerpts from his essay. The entire essay may be downloaded at the Bigelow site https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

Relativity of space/time: Ruickbie excerpt #27

Psychologist Leo Ruickbie writes in “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies:  

Taking one example, journalist  Irene Corbally Kuhn's (1898–1995) consciousness could ‘see’ and ‘hear’ in a three-dimensional, full-color, realistic world, with time progression, in her future, even though her sense organs – her eye and ears – were still in the body holding onto the lamppost in her present.* Only a consciousness that is not the product of the brain could seemingly act independently of it, but then we must also concede that consciousness is no longer in space and time as we commonly experience them.

As the accusation stands against some of our colleagues, have we also violated “the basic laws of physics as they are currently understood?” Are Newton and Einstein turning in their graves? The orbit and rotation of Mercury violated Newton’s Universal Law of Gravitation, but did we deny the existence of Mercury because of that? Luckily not, because Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity was able to account for the observed deviation. Just as Einstein at first rejected later interpretations of Quantum Mechanics, with its “spooky action at a distance” and dice-playing deities, so he finally had to accept them. As Einstein found out, even the ‘laws of physics’ violate the laws of physics. There is always an ongoing tension between some observables and the framework established by so-called laws, which are really just mathematical statements about physical relationships. So, have we violated any laws and what would that mean?

Science had once reached a point when everything seemed certain and only a small amount of tidying up remained. In 1878, the German physicist Philipp von Jolly advised one of his students not to go into physics because “in this field, almost everything is already discovered, and all that remains is to fill a few unimportant holes.”

Max Planck                  

That student was Max Planck, who along with Albert Einstein, revolutionized physics in the early twentieth century: Planck with his solution to black-body radiation in 1900, which introduced the concept of “quanta,” and, drawing upon that, Einstein’s solution to the photoelectric effect in 1905 (before his Theory of Special Relativity, and later General Theory of Relativity), and we were plunged down the rabbit hole of Quantum Mechanics.

“Physical objects are not in space,” said Einstein, “but these objects are spatially extended (as fields). In this way the concept ‘empty space’ loses its meaning [...] the field thus becomes an irreducible element of physical description, irreducible in the same sense as the concept of matter (particles) in the theory of Newton." But ‘the field’ changes our understanding of ‘matter.’

Giving a lecture in Florence, Planck told his audience “having studied the atom, I am telling you that there is no matter as such. All matter arises and persists only due to a force that causes the atomic particles to vibrate, holding them together in the tiniest of solar systems, the atom.” We have since revised this model: it is only the measurement of the electron’s position that creates a point-like particle, meaning that unmeasured electrons should be thought of more like waves (or fields), creating an electron ‘cloud’ around the atomic nucleus in which there is a probability of finding an electron.

The materiality of things – this page, the eyes reading it and so on – are mostly empty spaces defined by probabilities surrounding infinitesimal balls of quarks in gluon fields. That is certainly not how we experience reality in the everyday world. And the immateriality of ghosts and consciousness suddenly seems less problematic. 

 

* See Ruickbie excerpt #18.

Leo Ruickbie, “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies. Ruickbie teaches psychology at Kings College and the University of Northamptom in the United Kingdom. Footnotes have been deleted from these online excerpts from his essay. The entire essay may be downloaded at the Bigelow site https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.